'Insider moments': Trafalgar’s new way of traveling

MANILA, Philippines - Gavin Tollman is the picture of a landed gentleman, surrounded by his two shorthaired Dachshunds, Snoopy and Clyde, in a stately drawing room of the Chesterfield Mayfair hotel. But since he became CEO of Trafalgar in 2009, a company built up by his father and uncle after the Second World War, he’s brought a hands-on approach to re-imagining travel.

Gavin says, “When I told people I run a tour company, there was an immediate response: ‘Oh, those are tours for old people.’ And I said, ‘If we want to truly grow the business and make it a sustainable one, you have to move from being seen as a superficial-old-person way of going to destinations to becoming aspirational travel.’ So we asked, how can we leverage our knowledge and expertise and show it in a way they couldn’t do if they were traveling on their own?”

One new approach was the Be My Guest program, in which travelers get to have dinner with a real person in a real home at their destination. It started in Sorrento in 2010, with a lady named Mama Esposito, who had a beautiful lemon grove overlooking the bay of Naples where guests stayed for dinner. Trafalgar guests called it the highlight of their trip; Tollman knew they were on to something. Now, Be My Guest experiences are offered in France, Italy, the US, the UK, and scores of other locations.

“What we saw was that if one did it in a deeper, richer way, if we started taking guests into a destination but taking them below the surface of it, it actually was a sustainable business model,” he says. From a business that began by taking servicemen back through Europe after WWII, Trafalgar has kept on evolving. And so has the market. People know a lot more in advance, thanks to social media and the net. They want deeper experiences.

“The core of what we do is we look at travel through guests’ eyes. We try to ensure that everybody’s had something that touched them. The key phrase is ‘insider moments.’ The word ‘moments’ is something I got from our guests. They tell me about something they did, ‘I had this moment,’ or ‘That was a unique moment.’ It’s this moment that, when you go home, you’ll want to tell everybody about — a moment that changed your perception or showed you something about the destination that blew you away.”

With Asia traveling the world more broadly, Filipinos today definitely want to see sights beyond the Big Ben and Stonehenge. In fact, Trafalgar reports 83 percent growth among its Filipino bookings for three years straight. “Bookings in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines are growing at a hugely accelerating rate,” Tollman notes. “Our feedback from Asian countries has been outstanding.” Insider Experiences is partly the reason.

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To learn more about Trafalgar holidays, visit Trafalgar.com or facebook.com/Trafalgar Travel; on Twitter, tweet @TrafalgarTalk. To book a holiday, call Pan Pacific Travel in Manila at 523-1990 or 810-8551 in Makati, or e-mail trafalgarmanila@panpacifictravel.com.ph.